Seven of Wands
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as standing your ground against pressure from many sides. Waite tied it to valor and the advantage of the high position.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as feeling overwhelmed, giving way, or anxiety about being outnumbered.
A question to sit with
Which position here is worth defending, and which are you holding out of habit? Where is your high ground?
The deeper reading
Traditionally the will defending what it believes in. Readers take it as conviction under strain.
What is drawn on the card
A young man on a ridge holds a wand in both hands to fend off six wands rising from below. He wears a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other, as though he dressed in a hurry.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A young man on a rocky height brandishes a staff; six staves rise toward him from below.
- Suit
- Wands
- Element
- Fire
- Domain
- Will, passion, creativity, action
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Seven of Wands is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.